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QPSA May 4 Games Update

SNAPMEUP SIGN-UPS vs. SITE SIGN-UPS

I stupidly forgot to take readings on March 31st and April 30th, but the right hand column in the chart below covers the 35 days from March 30th to May 4th, which is 5 days longer than April. The total SnapMeUp sign-ups for that period is 1,952,602. That’s 55,789 per day. 55,789 x 5 = 278,945. 1,952,602 – 278.945 = 1,673,657. So that’s about 300,000 less than April site sign-ups reported in yesterday’s PR (reported as “nearly 2.0 million”).

So presumably about 300,000 people opted out of SnapMeUp when they signed up (or some people may have deleted SnapMeUp from their My Games list).

This seems to tell us that SnapMeUp is NOT an extremely accurate predictor of site sign-ups – unless it turns out to be consistently below by a certain percentage or amount.

WONDERFUL CITY
Wonderful City is moving on up. In the membership PR they stated, ““we are very pleased with the initial results of the Wonderful City beta-launch…” Is 43,000 in a couple of weeks out of millions of users something to be “very pleased” about? Maybe. At least it seems to have moved more quickly than the other titles.



WONDERFUL CITY PAYMENT SCREEN
Here’s the Wonderful City payment screen (English version). I thought it would be fun to post it as evidence of real money potentially coming to the site. But then I started wondering about the amounts and doing some calculations.



First, I wondered how many coins there were per dollar. A natural question, I think, as you decide what to buy.

 
                                Ratio 
 Cost   Dollars    Coins   (Coins to Dollars) 
 $62     645      390,000       604.65 
 $31     310      180,000       580.65 
 $25     240      140,000       583.33 
 $12     118       67,000       567.80 
 $6       56       32,000       571.43 
 $3       25       15,000       600.00 
 

What I think is going on here is that as you move up from the smaller to larger amounts they wanted to give you a slightly better deal, but they did it in an odd way and got a result that is quite confusing. For example, on the second row from the bottom, why not go to 55 instead of 56? That’s still more than double the 25 on the row below (for double the cost), but multiplied by 600 gives 33,000 in coins, still a round number for coins and still the same 600:1 ratio.

Then I noticed the “22% OFF” and “23% OFF” to induce people to choose the large $62 payment. So – naturally – I wondered, “22% and 23% off of what?”

Well, I haven’t figured it out yet. On the dollar side, as you see below, the cost per dollar for 645 is a little less than 20% off the cost per dollar for 25 of them. Is that it? Is that the “22% off” and they’re just slightly incorrect when they say 22%? Maybe they changed the amounts and forgot to change the % off statement? On the coin side (calculations not shown) it’s a little more than 20% off of the 15,000 for $3 line.

 
                                 Cost  
        Cost     Dollars      Per Dollar      % of Previous Row     % of 25 for $3 Row 
  $   62.00         645             0.096            96.124%               80.103% 
  $   31.00         310             0.100            96.000% 
  $   25.00         240             0.104           102.431% 
  $   12.00         118             0.102            94.915% 
  $    6.00          56             0.107            89.286% 
  $    3.00          25             0.120  

Notice also that as you move up and buy more, it’s slightly cheaper per dollar, as you might expect – except if you buy 240 for $25 it costs you more per dollar than if you buy 118 for $12.

Is this just some programmer being sloppy? I think you would want to make real money transactions as simple and straightforward as possible. Maybe I’m missing something.